The Pianist of Willesden Lane - the Music Repertoire
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Learning LINKS SPRING 202I ONLINE SERIES BROADEN THE HORIZONS OF YOUR CLASSROOM. EXPERIENCE THE VIBRANT WORLD OF THE ARTS The Pianist of WITH THE McCALLUM! Willesden Lane Performed by Mona Golabek April 12 – May 9, 2021 Expanding the concept of literacy WHAT IS A “TEXT”? We invite you to consider the performances on McCallum’s Online Series as non-print texts available for study and investigation by your students. Anyone who has shown a filmed version of a play in their classroom, used a website as companion to a textbook, or asked students to do online research already knows that “texts” don’t begin and end with textbooks, novels, and reading packets. They extend to videos, websites, games, plays, concerts, dances, radio programs, and a number of other non-print texts that students and teachers engage with on a regular basis. We know that when we expand our definition of texts to the variety of media that we use in our everyday lives, we broaden the materials and concepts we have at our disposal in the classroom, increase student engagement, and enrich learning experiences. Please consider how utilizing your McCallum performance as a text might align to standards established for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language. How do we help students to use these texts as a way of shaping ideas and understanding the world? Please use this material to help you on this journey. NON-PRINT TEXT Any medium/text that creates meaning through sound or images or both, such as symbols, words, songs, speeches, pictures, and illustrations not in traditional print form including those seen on computers, films, and in the environment. The Pianist of TEXTS BY MARK ALMY, EXCEPT WHERE Willesden Lane OTHERWISE CREDITED Performed by Mona Golabek Connecting to curriculum and students’ lives! HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY > World War II, Austria, England ARTS > Theater, music, classical composers, the piano IDEAS > Injustice, inhumanity, survival, generations Table of Contents The Work - The play: The Pianist of Willesden Lane - The music repertoire The Artists - Creator and performer Mona Golabek - Pianist Lisa Jura - Director Hershey Felder - Mona Golabek interview Craft - The piano - The rise of the public concert pianist - One-person plays Roots - Holocaust - Kindertransport - Classical music eras Sample Lessons - Companion projects for the classroom Resources - Read it here! - Hear it too! - On the Web Glossary - Useful terms in studying this work of art 2 The Work The Pianist of Willesden Lane The play A woman takes her place at the piano and begins to tell her story – or rather, her mother’s story. Her fingers, ever nimble, flutter one second and strike the next, extracting from her instrument the whole range of sounds the telling of such a story demands. For this is the story of a youngster torn from her family in Vienna and sped by train – the Kindertransport (Children’s Transport)– to the safer shores of Britain in 1938. Her name? Lisa Jura. She couldn’t have known as she made her way to safety that her parents would die in a Nazi concentration camp. But she surely experienced the pain of separation, not least separation from her two siblings. Of the couple’s three children, it was she who received the single ticket the family had at its disposal, perhaps because as a prodigy of the piano she seemed poised for a future which must not be cut short. Now, daughter Mona, her student and survivor, shares the story of that prodigy – the carrying for- ward, generation by generation, of the sacred flame of artistry – with us. Adapting her own book of the same title, she interweaves speaking in the voice of her mother with playing the pieces which her mother taught her on the piano. She begins fittingly at the beginning – in Vienna as the fates of Jewish families gradually worsen, moves through the Kinderstransport, and on through the Blitzkrieg in London. Her fingertips alternately caress and storm the keyboard. The sounds of Beethoven, Debussy and Chopin express one moment all the horrors of the time and the next the delicacy of daily joys. As Ms. Golabek tells us, however, it is Edvard Grieg’s piano concerto which plays the central role. It had held a special place in the affections of Lisa. She meant to make her professional debut with this work. How many times over the subsequent years had she tried to convey to her daughter the ways in which the Norwegian composer’s melodic passages expressed all the different facets of her life experience? Daughter Mona demonstrates. The first movement of Grieg’s masterpiece – all fire, bombast, and passion – connects to those now distant, turbulent days in Vienna…the uncertainty, the confusion, the growing dread, the mounting violence. She turns next to the second movement. Here too is drama and peril. This, mother has assured daughter, tells in musical terms what those foreboding days and terror-filled nights in London were, for her. In this movement, too, are passages of tenderness and calm. In these, the pianist finds reference to her mother – “saucy, vivacious, but with a profound piece of her heart missing.” She moves then to the concerto’s conclusion, its third movement. Here, if there 3 is passion, there is also resolution. Ms. Golabek’s playing is by turns probing and brilliant. She launches into the cadenza. (A cadenza is a solo flourish – often extended and demanding special virtuosity – which comes very near the end of a piece.) Her voice soars over the swirling scales as she informs us “My mother told me that when the bombs started in England, she’d go down to the basement of the hostel and pound out the cadenza of the Grieg, determined to drown out the bombs.” She pauses, as if struck fresh by the familiar, beloved strains. “Stunning music, isn’t it?” Similarly she finds the power of Rachmaninoff chords illustrative of D-day. In the intricate, repetitive patterns of a Bach partita she uncovers a correlative to her mother’s sewing machine as it spit out uniform after uniform in an army factory. Rounding off this moving presentation are archival photos and newsreel footage. These get projected onto a screen. Ms. Golabek isn’t an actor and doesn’t aspire to be one. Instead, her style is simple and sincere. She tells her mother’s story with integrity – and gets us rivetingly to imagine Lisa Jura’s life in London. Mona adopts the voices of various men, women and refugee children her mother encountered. She causes us to feel the anxiety of trying to make – and losing – contact with family members back in Austria. Above all she provokes in us some sense of the passion she and her mother both developed for the piano, the triumph of career highs, and the satisfaction of expressing all there is to be expressed through those flurries of notes. The play, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, opened in Los Angeles at the Geffen Playhouse in 2012, and has been performed subsequently in Chicago, Boston, Berkeley and New York. The book, on which the play is based, came about when in 1983 Mona Golabek, performing Grieg’s piano concerto, found herself thinking, “This was the piece of music that told the story of [my mother’s] life.” So she set about interviewing her mother’s friends, and with the information and insights she gathered, and with the help of co-author Lee Cohen, began to reconstruct her mother’s life. Now the book exists in adaptations for all age levels. (see Resources, pages 11-12) The music repertoire Mona Golabek performs selected passages from the following works. These are woven into the fabric of the play. In her view, the music tells the story along with her words. See if you agree. Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor The history of Norway is intimately linked with both Sweden and Denmark. For many years, Denmark dominated its larger neighbor, Copenhagen serving as its cultural center. At age 15 Grieg entered the music conservatory at Leipzig, Germany. Four years later, he was an accomplished musician. Early pieces gained him favorable attention. But as he went along he was increasingly dissatisfied with the heavily Germanic influence present in his work. Led by the example of colleagues, he began moving toward a more specifically Norwegian style of composition, based in large part on native folk tunes. In this he was emulating the Russians who strove to develop a distinctly Russian music, and Dvorak whose musical themes were often adapted from Czech folk tunes. 4 In 1868, he finished what is perhaps his most revered piece, the Piano Concerto in A-minor Opus. 16. He was just 24 years old. It has three movements – or sections. It shares in common with Robert Schumann’s piano concerto a similarity of feel. They are both in the key of A-minor. And neither composer ever wrote a second. We know that Grieg heard the Schumann played by Schumann’s wife Clara in Leipzig in 1858. We also know the Grieg revised his concerto no fewer than seven times. He was a tireless worker and could be quite critical of his compositions. The A-minor concerto was, by the way, the very first concerto to be recorded in the early days of sound recording. Owing to the crude technology of the time, however, the full length work was cut down to a mere six minutes. Claude Debussy: Clair de lune This well-loved work constitutes one of four movements of Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, which is among his most acclaimed piano suites. Originally written in 1890, it was heavily revised by the composer for its eventual publication in 1905.